By Robert L. Rosebrock ——Bio and Archives--September 9, 2017
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I choose the year 1910 because that was the year I was 21 years of age -- a kid with hardly any schooling, no capital, but a tremendous belief in America. The Horatio Alger stories were popular -- we believed them. We saw other people succeeding and we believed we could, and a great many of us have. In 1919, the nation had been in existence for 125 years. We had a population of 90 million people. Can you even guess what the federal budget was in 1910? To govern 90 million people? We did research and found that the budget was 3/4 of a billion dollars. We also found that the national debt in 1910 was one billion dollars. We had fought several wars before 1910, but you know we were still honest people then; during each war we accumulated a national debt and honestly went to work and paid it off after the war was over.
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Fifty-six years have passed since 1910. Our budget which was 3/4 of a billion dollars then has multiplied (but our population has only doubled) our budget has multiplied 125 times; it is costing 125 times as much to govern twice as many people as it did in 1910. Our federal debt has jumped from one billion dollars to some 320 odd billion dollars and in the last six years it has gone up at an average rate of 650 thousand dollars an hour, day and night, hour after hour after hour. Now when I give you these figures, 325 billion dollars, I doubt that you can think about how big that amount is. Maybe some of you Texas financiers can, but I can't even think about 325 billion dollars, and to help me try to understand what it was all about, I took one billion dollars. I found that if I had had one billion dollars the year Christ was born and I went into business for myself and I turned out to be a poor business man and I lost a thousand dollars a day, I could have lost a thousand dollars a day every day since Christ was born, until today, and I could continue to lose a thousand dollars a day for another 700 years, and then if I decided I was a poor business man, I could retire with 25 million dollars, out of that one billion. You and I owe 325 billion dollars. “
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